I notice this walking through tunnels between underground stations. One of the tunnels between different lines at King's Cross St Pancras (London) is very steep, but the tiles/lines/decor is all parallel with the floor. It's quite disconcerting.
According to Google, UK£ 4 = $6.42800 which is still at least double what an HDMI cable goes for on Monoprice (depending on length that they are selling)
On Amazon.co.uk there are cables for less than £2 (and that includes the tax, although not delivery). High street shops are usually more expensive, you pay for the convenience.
So, what exactly have you done to not support Chinese? Do you buy products that have been only made and manufactured in the US, even if its higher price? Do you own iPhone or any other known mobile phone?
It wasn't any part of my decision to buy the phone, but HTC makes stuff in Taiwan (they are a Taiwanese company).
The problem with that one is the lane markings. They don't spiral out, so you have to think where you're going at every point.
Look Here (London, UK -- driving on the left, obviously). The lane markings guide the drivers towards the exit they wanted (assuming they picked the correct lane when they approached). Look on streetview if you wish.
Also, the road numbers are painted in the lanes in gigantic letters.
My organisation (British government, science research) employs lots of interns ("placement students" or "summer students", depending whether they're doing a whole year between 2nd and 3rd year of their degree, or just a summer). Most are scienctists, but some are IT. All of them are paid £12k, which is minimum wage -- unfortunately we don't have the budget to pay any more, but it is enough to live on. If they weren't paid, we'd only be able to "employ" students with rich parents, which isn't fair at all.
[And if there are any students at UK universities studying CS (or related) who want a 12 month placement for 2011-2012, I think we will be advertising soon. The job is partly 2nd-line support, partly some small development tasks. We're in London, you'll have heard of the organisation. Email me, and I'll let you know when the jobs are advertised.]
Not really. Traditionally, a 'bedroom' is a room without some other explicit purpose (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) *which has a closet* and is only accessible through a doorway. The same room *without* a closet is a 'study'. The same room without a door is a 'den', 'living room', 'dining room', or 'family room'.
Not in Britain, since we don't tend to have closets. (I think this would apply to lots of Europe, but I've not been in enough bedrooms to know.) Instead we have wardrobes. You can swap a bedroom for a study by moving the bed and wardrobe(s) out, and moving a desk in; but when selling the house both rooms will be counted as "bedrooms" (in the UK, anyway).
And you can really get (un)limited mobile data for 10 pounds a year? That's amazing.
That seems to be a one-off promotion, or else a very broad interpretation of what "unlimited" or "internet" means. However, it does show the level of competition -- there are at least a couple of networks offering similar deals.
For normal deals, £5/month seems to get about 500MB and £15 unlimited data (and texts, and some minutes). That's with three.co.uk (who own infrastructure, but are smaller than the bigger infrastructure-owning operators), the virtual operators have different deals.
How do I have to imagine a "4 bedroom house"? A bedroom is any room I can place a bed in. So does this mean it's a house with 4 rooms that are not already kitchen, bathroom and so on?
Pretty much, yes.
Bedrooms ~= Number of rooms - kitchens - bathrooms - defined communal rooms (living rooms, dining rooms, whatever you want to call them).
My parents, now that I've moved out and my sister's moved out, have a 4 bedroom house with 2 bedrooms (theirs, my brother's), a spare bedroom and a "study" (aka room full of junk).
I lived in London for a decade and don't remember being asked about that
There was a proposal to build a 12-storey residential building on some spare land behind the local High Street, which was rejected after all the rich people said they didn't like the idea of having more people living here. What they meant was probably that they liked their existing rental income. (I wrote in and supported it, but I don't have a six-figure salary.)
But the things is that instead of building upwards, the property owners of London have spent the last couple of decades subdividing. Properties in London are now absolutely tiny.
That is exactly the problem. Student accommodation in London is the worst offender, IME -- probably because students are relatively poor but really want to be close to their university. I was really lucky with the first place I rented (with three friends) in 2006 -- the agent showed us round a place which had 8 students living there, but a change in the law meant he could then only let 4 people live there (he had to fit a fire alarm system etc to have 8 tenants). That meant we had some communal rooms -- when 8 people had been in that house they'd not had any communal rooms except the kitchen and the bathroom.
A year later I had to move (the landlord wanted to fit the fire alarm system and rent to a group of 8), and I ended up living in a basement flat, which was the "lower ground" floor of a subdivided house. We had three bedrooms plus a kitchen and a bathroom. That was shit, although I didn't realise how bad it would be until I'd lived there a month (too late).
The people that really lose out from the lack of laws (some countries have laws stating the minimum floor area per person) and middle-class resistance to new buildings are the young and the poor-ish. I think it's despicable.
They are able, but not willing. A lot of people in London and a lot of English, don't want their city going up and up and up in height. A lot less natural light, and more people. They don't want London turning into Singapore which is the way that it would go if the developers had their way.
I can understand arguments against building 20+ storey buildings everywhere, but I don't see a problem with putting 5-storey buildings in large areas of inner London, yet they don't get built either.
Nursie's comment about subdividing is exactly the problem we have (and it means we have the additional people anyway, and less space per person). I'm 25, and I'm sharing a house with three friends. For the same money I could rent a tiny flat (i.e. subdivided house), and have hardly any space.
I'd rather have a decent amount of my own space and live in a 4-6 storey building, which is normal in most other large European cities.
There is much lower movement of labour in Europe compared to the US. I understand it would be no huge deal to move from, say, Washington DC to Boston, but moving a similar distance in Europe may well require learning a different language. Or, to put it another way, if I tell my British family I've just taken a job in France, they'll have more to say than "OK, let me know how it goes". (This is why we have big economic problems with the Euro -- if this was the USA, the unemployed Greeks/etc would move elsewhere.)
The result is the majority of people don't have lots of people to talk to in other countries, and a lot of the people roaming are either on holiday or on a short business trip.
However, even with all that the EU is looking at more regulation to lower the cost of roaming.
Regulation in some EU countries (and some other countries) has forced the networks to allow "virtual" operators (who don't own the infrastructure) to offer services. They are often cheaper for some kinds of users, but less flexible (e.g. might not sell phones on a contract).
The house I rent in London has 3 bedrooms (plus another room which is about as big as a double bed). It's "worth" about £600,000. It's in a nice area, has a very small garden, and is 3 minutes walk from a tube station.
For some reason no-one is willing to build decent houses/flats in English cities. Many European cities have large areas of 4/5/6 storey residential buildings, but not here.
Ya, he could of stolen the Xbox, but I'm thinking he didn't, unless he's breaking into peoples houses, they aren't that easy to steal (reserve the right to be wrong).
The 13-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because of his age, was accused of a number of burglaries in the Downpatrick area of Co Down
So he is accused of breaking into property, which is most likely houses (though it could be shops, offices etc). Though I would guess the Xbox isn't stolen.
>>The case was heard in Belfast. Northern Ireland - part of the UK, not the republic of Ireland.
Both of which are on what island?
Would you say India if you mean Pakistan? India can refer to the Indian subcontinent, but in the context of discussing a legal system, it would mean the country.
Re:Is this why I am getting worse results
on
Google's New Design
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· Score: 1
My results for "shit" are - Wikipedia - internetisshit.org - shitbrix.com - urban dictionary - youtube -- random funny shit
But Google's results are influenced by so many things (in this case: by my IP geolocating to London, UK; by my choice of google.co.uk; by being logged in to Google Mail; by whatever cookies are on my machine... although I think I blocked them)
Back in my day we refused to use MySpace because it looked like someone had vomited on the Internet. We used LiveJournal to write notes that no one ever read instead.
Back in my day we refused to use LiveJournal (too popular), and used DeadJournal instead. No one ever seemed to read the poetry.
(I only ever made one post, and I can't even remember my username. A couple of friends were pretty serious about their goth poetry though.)
Percentage of overall software sales should be mandated by law for employees and contractors. [...] It avoids but does not preclude the "union" issue.
Why don't the developers form/join a union? That would seem the best way to get that law written.
AFAIK there isn't a specific union for IT workers here (though one could be started). Prospect is the union for professional engineers. I work for the government, so some of my colleagues belong to PCS (Public and Commercial Services Union) and are going on strike tomorrow.
This is sort of unrelated, but why do you have 60+ tabs open? I never have more than ten, and thats only when I'm wiki-crawling. I've always wondered why people have so many tabs open at the same time.
Laziness, convenience, and because it (somehow?) works fine in Opera. I often middle-click 10 links from a single page (e.g. search results on a shopping site), then 10 more (from the next page of search results), then go through the resulting 20 tabs.
I have just 15 open here (home), but at work there are probably about 35. My brother (on the rare occasion I see his computer) seems to have about 200 tabs open in Opera all the time, my mum about 100.
(Of my open tabs, four are the forgotten tabs of the search I did for a recipe earlier, three are the remaining interesting/. stories, five are documentation from a project I was working on months ago,... you get the idea)
I suggest you search the whole thread for UK, Britain, England, London (as people could have used any of those words). Someone's suggested T-Mobile, another Vodafone.
There are no restrictions on buying SIM cards in the UK, you will be able to pay cash and top-up by buying vouchers from corner shops or supermarkets (or online) or perhaps at cash machines (ATMs) with a green arrow logo. The main companies (Vodafone, O2, Orange/T-Mobile, Three,...) have shops everywhere, some supermarkets sell their own SIMs which may be cheaper (Tesco, Asda), and some companies sell SIMs online or in some corner shops (Virgin Mobile, Lycamobile).
Here's a comparison of some deals from the larger operators. Three's looks like a good option, but if you intend to phone/text Canada check the prices of that. (I would search Google.co.uk for things like "pay as you go price comparison". Also "mobile" rather than cell, and SIM only as you already have the phone. There are often wikis/forums targeted at visitors answering your question, I used this one when I visited Germany last month.)
Open WiFi networks aren't very common, but many cafes, restaurants and larger pubs have WiFi. (I may be wrong here, I usually have WiFi turned off.)
Bring an old phone to put your Canadian SIM in, if you still need to be contactable on that number.
The happy-rainbows-EU-regulation-low-(ish)-prices thing only applies while roaming or calling within the EU, so don't assume a call to Canada will be cheap (there is competition, but no regulation). But receiving a call on a UK mobile phone while in the UK is always free.
If you travel to a country more than once it's probably worth buying a local SIM card when you're there. I bought a SIM from a small supermarket in Germany for €9.90, which included €10 of credit. €3.90 paid for 100MB of data, or €9.90 would have paid for 1GB. Phone calls/texts within Germany were also cheap.
(This was for a music festival, so I then got drunk, and when it finished at 9:30 (in the morning) played some YouTube videos, and used up all the 100MB + all the remaining credit. Oops.)
I put my normal SIM in my old phone, in case people tried to contact me on it.
Running experiment now...So I posted a link to a greasemonkey script that blocks facebook ads: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46560 It's been an hr now and my friend and I can still see it on my profile.
Try posting a link to The Pirate Bay, for example (even in a chat). It disappears immediately for me.
It's immoral to pay the assholes who sell physical CDs, major labels, etc. To me, the moral question is more : How much more convenient & pleasant do they need to make it before I buy the product?
If your morals are purely based on convenience and pleasure I think you need to re-evaluate them.
I would never purchase music or movies except from a truly independent artist, like PJ Harvey.
According to Wikipedia, her music is released on Island Records, which is owned by UMG.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice this walking through tunnels between underground stations. One of the tunnels between different lines at King's Cross St Pancras (London) is very steep, but the tiles/lines/decor is all parallel with the floor. It's quite disconcerting.
Don't forget about the mud nozzle behind you to squirt a line of muddy water droplets up and down your back.
Like most bikes intended for non-leisure use, and not purchased from a supermarket, my bike has mudguards :-)
How about a giant fan to provide a headwind? And will the whole thing be stolen every few years?
According to Google, UK£ 4 = $6.42800 which is still at least double what an HDMI cable goes for on Monoprice (depending on length that they are selling)
On Amazon.co.uk there are cables for less than £2 (and that includes the tax, although not delivery). High street shops are usually more expensive, you pay for the convenience.
So, what exactly have you done to not support Chinese? Do you buy products that have been only made and manufactured in the US, even if its higher price? Do you own iPhone or any other known mobile phone?
It wasn't any part of my decision to buy the phone, but HTC makes stuff in Taiwan (they are a Taiwanese company).
The problem with that one is the lane markings. They don't spiral out, so you have to think where you're going at every point.
Look Here (London, UK -- driving on the left, obviously). The lane markings guide the drivers towards the exit they wanted (assuming they picked the correct lane when they approached). Look on streetview if you wish.
Also, the road numbers are painted in the lanes in gigantic letters.
Do you pay your interns?
My organisation (British government, science research) employs lots of interns ("placement students" or "summer students", depending whether they're doing a whole year between 2nd and 3rd year of their degree, or just a summer). Most are scienctists, but some are IT. All of them are paid £12k, which is minimum wage -- unfortunately we don't have the budget to pay any more, but it is enough to live on. If they weren't paid, we'd only be able to "employ" students with rich parents, which isn't fair at all.
[And if there are any students at UK universities studying CS (or related) who want a 12 month placement for 2011-2012, I think we will be advertising soon. The job is partly 2nd-line support, partly some small development tasks. We're in London, you'll have heard of the organisation. Email me, and I'll let you know when the jobs are advertised.]
Not really. Traditionally, a 'bedroom' is a room without some other explicit purpose (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) *which has a closet* and is only accessible through a doorway. The same room *without* a closet is a 'study'. The same room without a door is a 'den', 'living room', 'dining room', or 'family room'.
Not in Britain, since we don't tend to have closets. (I think this would apply to lots of Europe, but I've not been in enough bedrooms to know.) Instead we have wardrobes. You can swap a bedroom for a study by moving the bed and wardrobe(s) out, and moving a desk in; but when selling the house both rooms will be counted as "bedrooms" (in the UK, anyway).
It's more like $20-30 a month.
And you can really get (un)limited mobile data for 10 pounds a year? That's amazing.
That seems to be a one-off promotion, or else a very broad interpretation of what "unlimited" or "internet" means. However, it does show the level of competition -- there are at least a couple of networks offering similar deals.
For normal deals, £5/month seems to get about 500MB and £15 unlimited data (and texts, and some minutes). That's with three.co.uk (who own infrastructure, but are smaller than the bigger infrastructure-owning operators), the virtual operators have different deals.
How do I have to imagine a "4 bedroom house"?
A bedroom is any room I can place a bed in. So does this mean it's a house with 4 rooms that are not already kitchen, bathroom and so on?
Pretty much, yes.
Bedrooms ~= Number of rooms - kitchens - bathrooms - defined communal rooms (living rooms, dining rooms, whatever you want to call them).
My parents, now that I've moved out and my sister's moved out, have a 4 bedroom house with 2 bedrooms (theirs, my brother's), a spare bedroom and a "study" (aka room full of junk).
I lived in London for a decade and don't remember being asked about that
There was a proposal to build a 12-storey residential building on some spare land behind the local High Street, which was rejected after all the rich people said they didn't like the idea of having more people living here. What they meant was probably that they liked their existing rental income. (I wrote in and supported it, but I don't have a six-figure salary.)
But the things is that instead of building upwards, the property owners of London have spent the last couple of decades subdividing. Properties in London are now absolutely tiny.
That is exactly the problem. Student accommodation in London is the worst offender, IME -- probably because students are relatively poor but really want to be close to their university. I was really lucky with the first place I rented (with three friends) in 2006 -- the agent showed us round a place which had 8 students living there, but a change in the law meant he could then only let 4 people live there (he had to fit a fire alarm system etc to have 8 tenants). That meant we had some communal rooms -- when 8 people had been in that house they'd not had any communal rooms except the kitchen and the bathroom.
A year later I had to move (the landlord wanted to fit the fire alarm system and rent to a group of 8), and I ended up living in a basement flat, which was the "lower ground" floor of a subdivided house. We had three bedrooms plus a kitchen and a bathroom. That was shit, although I didn't realise how bad it would be until I'd lived there a month (too late).
The people that really lose out from the lack of laws (some countries have laws stating the minimum floor area per person) and middle-class resistance to new buildings are the young and the poor-ish. I think it's despicable.
They are able, but not willing. A lot of people in London and a lot of English, don't want their city going up and up and up in height. A lot less natural light, and more people. They don't want London turning into Singapore which is the way that it would go if the developers had their way.
I can understand arguments against building 20+ storey buildings everywhere, but I don't see a problem with putting 5-storey buildings in large areas of inner London, yet they don't get built either.
Nursie's comment about subdividing is exactly the problem we have (and it means we have the additional people anyway, and less space per person). I'm 25, and I'm sharing a house with three friends. For the same money I could rent a tiny flat (i.e. subdivided house), and have hardly any space.
I'd rather have a decent amount of my own space and live in a 4-6 storey building, which is normal in most other large European cities.
There is much lower movement of labour in Europe compared to the US. I understand it would be no huge deal to move from, say, Washington DC to Boston, but moving a similar distance in Europe may well require learning a different language. Or, to put it another way, if I tell my British family I've just taken a job in France, they'll have more to say than "OK, let me know how it goes".
(This is why we have big economic problems with the Euro -- if this was the USA, the unemployed Greeks/etc would move elsewhere.)
The result is the majority of people don't have lots of people to talk to in other countries, and a lot of the people roaming are either on holiday or on a short business trip.
However, even with all that the EU is looking at more regulation to lower the cost of roaming.
Regulation in some EU countries (and some other countries) has forced the networks to allow "virtual" operators (who don't own the infrastructure) to offer services. They are often cheaper for some kinds of users, but less flexible (e.g. might not sell phones on a contract).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator
The house I rent in London has 3 bedrooms (plus another room which is about as big as a double bed). It's "worth" about £600,000. It's in a nice area, has a very small garden, and is 3 minutes walk from a tube station.
For some reason no-one is willing to build decent houses/flats in English cities. Many European cities have large areas of 4/5/6 storey residential buildings, but not here.
Ya, he could of stolen the Xbox, but I'm thinking he didn't, unless he's breaking into peoples houses, they aren't that easy to steal (reserve the right to be wrong).
The 13-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because of his age, was accused of a number of burglaries in the Downpatrick area of Co Down
So he is accused of breaking into property, which is most likely houses (though it could be shops, offices etc). Though I would guess the Xbox isn't stolen.
>>The case was heard in Belfast. Northern Ireland - part of the UK, not the republic of Ireland.
Both of which are on what island?
Would you say India if you mean Pakistan? India can refer to the Indian subcontinent, but in the context of discussing a legal system, it would mean the country.
My results for "shit" are
- Wikipedia
- internetisshit.org
- shitbrix.com
- urban dictionary
- youtube -- random funny shit
http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=opera&rls=en-GB&q=shit&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
But Google's results are influenced by so many things (in this case: by my IP geolocating to London, UK; by my choice of google.co.uk; by being logged in to Google Mail; by whatever cookies are on my machine... although I think I blocked them)
Congratulations on the repeat GET (#36603660).
Ah, this is the UID competition I win. (Years ago someone told me they liked the symmetry with the number and the name, I hadn't notice it myself.)
Back in my day we refused to use MySpace because it looked like someone had vomited on the Internet. We used LiveJournal to write notes that no one ever read instead.
Back in my day we refused to use LiveJournal (too popular), and used DeadJournal instead. No one ever seemed to read the poetry.
(I only ever made one post, and I can't even remember my username. A couple of friends were pretty serious about their goth poetry though.)
Percentage of overall software sales should be mandated by law for employees and contractors. [...] It avoids but does not preclude the "union" issue.
Why don't the developers form/join a union? That would seem the best way to get that law written.
AFAIK there isn't a specific union for IT workers here (though one could be started). Prospect is the union for professional engineers. I work for the government, so some of my colleagues belong to PCS (Public and Commercial Services Union) and are going on strike tomorrow.
This is sort of unrelated, but why do you have 60+ tabs open? I never have more than ten, and thats only when I'm wiki-crawling. I've always wondered why people have so many tabs open at the same time.
Laziness, convenience, and because it (somehow?) works fine in Opera. I often middle-click 10 links from a single page (e.g. search results on a shopping site), then 10 more (from the next page of search results), then go through the resulting 20 tabs.
I have just 15 open here (home), but at work there are probably about 35. My brother (on the rare occasion I see his computer) seems to have about 200 tabs open in Opera all the time, my mum about 100.
(Of my open tabs, four are the forgotten tabs of the search I did for a recipe earlier, three are the remaining interesting /. stories, five are documentation from a project I was working on months ago, ... you get the idea)
I suggest you search the whole thread for UK, Britain, England, London (as people could have used any of those words). Someone's suggested T-Mobile, another Vodafone.
There are no restrictions on buying SIM cards in the UK, you will be able to pay cash and top-up by buying vouchers from corner shops or supermarkets (or online) or perhaps at cash machines (ATMs) with a green arrow logo. The main companies (Vodafone, O2, Orange/T-Mobile, Three, ...) have shops everywhere, some supermarkets sell their own SIMs which may be cheaper (Tesco, Asda), and some companies sell SIMs online or in some corner shops (Virgin Mobile, Lycamobile).
Here's a comparison of some deals from the larger operators. Three's looks like a good option, but if you intend to phone/text Canada check the prices of that. (I would search Google.co.uk for things like "pay as you go price comparison". Also "mobile" rather than cell, and SIM only as you already have the phone. There are often wikis/forums targeted at visitors answering your question, I used this one when I visited Germany last month.)
Open WiFi networks aren't very common, but many cafes, restaurants and larger pubs have WiFi. (I may be wrong here, I usually have WiFi turned off.)
Bring an old phone to put your Canadian SIM in, if you still need to be contactable on that number.
The happy-rainbows-EU-regulation-low-(ish)-prices thing only applies while roaming or calling within the EU, so don't assume a call to Canada will be cheap (there is competition, but no regulation). But receiving a call on a UK mobile phone while in the UK is always free.
Have fun!
50MB for $60?
If you travel to a country more than once it's probably worth buying a local SIM card when you're there. I bought a SIM from a small supermarket in Germany for €9.90, which included €10 of credit. €3.90 paid for 100MB of data, or €9.90 would have paid for 1GB. Phone calls /texts within Germany were also cheap.
(This was for a music festival, so I then got drunk, and when it finished at 9:30 (in the morning) played some YouTube videos, and used up all the 100MB + all the remaining credit. Oops.)
I put my normal SIM in my old phone, in case people tried to contact me on it.
Running experiment now...So I posted a link to a greasemonkey script that blocks facebook ads: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46560 It's been an hr now and my friend and I can still see it on my profile.
Try posting a link to The Pirate Bay, for example (even in a chat). It disappears immediately for me.
It's immoral to pay the assholes who sell physical CDs, major labels, etc. To me, the moral question is more : How much more convenient & pleasant do they need to make it before I buy the product?
If your morals are purely based on convenience and pleasure I think you need to re-evaluate them.
I would never purchase music or movies except from a truly independent artist, like PJ Harvey.
According to Wikipedia, her music is released on Island Records, which is owned by UMG.